Story Behind the Success: 2023 International Radar Conference Best Student Paper Award Winners
The purpose of the Student Paper Competition is to recognize outstanding technical contributions from individual students.
Statements from the Students
I was honored to be selected for the top student paper award at the 2023 IEEE International Radar Conference in Sydney, Australia. I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Oklahoma and a Graduate Research Assistant at the Advanced Radar Research Center (ARRC). My research includes spectrum sensing and sharing techniques, pulse adaptive radar processing, interference mitigation, and the design of high-throughput digital systems on FPGA. Increased congestion of the electromagnetic spectrum has led to an expanded interest in adaptive spectrum sharing techniques. To opportunistically utilize the spectrum, spectrum sensing techniques can dynamically adapt to the spectrum on a pulse-to-pulse basis within a single coherent processing interval (CPI). Although intra-CPI pulse agility allows for more efficient spectrum use, it creates unique processing challenges by breaking the coherent processing assumption. This paper presents a modified backprojection algorithm that compensates for the baseband distortion caused by the frequency hopping and produces a range-Doppler map with a focused target. In addition to the simulated analysis, this work presents experimental results using frequency agile pulsed radar to measure a moving vehicle utilizing a USRP X310 software-defined radio (SDR) as a radar testbed. Future work will consider bandwidth agility in addition to frequency agility.
This success is made possible with the incredible support of my mother and sister, who continuously encourage me to pursue my goals. Further, the support of the faculty, staff, and other students and friends at the ARRC is instrumental. The breadth of insight and expertise and the collaborative environment at the ARRC make it a unique place that I am fortunate to be a part of.
Written by Rylee Mattingly
Attending the IEEE International Radar Conference has truly been rewarding (pun intended). It has been my privilege to listen to, learn from, and interact with experts on radar from all over the globe during this conference, and I am honored to receive this recognition. I have been an industrial PhD student at Saab and KTH in Stockholm, and this is my last conference as a student since I recently defended my thesis. I suppose many factors contribute to success. Three I would like to highlight are time, support, and luck. The work for which I received this award began in the fall of 2020. At that point, I had an idea which, after many months of research, turned out not to work that well in practice. Instead, I went with another approach, which is what I presented at the 2022 radar conference in New York. Unable to let my original idea of anomaly-based classification go, I continued the research. After some time, and having focused on other projects, I eventually came up with the method that I presented at this conference. None of this would have been possible without support from both family and colleagues. The former has been a factor for as long as I can remember. Finally, I must acknowledge luck or providence. It is perhaps not flattering to attribute one’s success to this, but I must confess that there have been many factors that have led up to this work that were simply a result of me being in the right place at the right time with the right people and supervisors.
I also owe my success to Saab, KTH, and the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP).
Written by Alexander Karlsson
